Medtronic seeks another bite at the apple in $24m patent loss to spine doc inventor

Medtronic (NYSE:MDT) asked a federal appeals court for a full-bench review of its nearly $24 million loss in a patent infringement lawsuit brought by a physician inventor.

In February 2014, Dr. Mark Berry alleged that Fridley, Minn.-based Medtronic infringed on three patents covering a “system and method for aligning vertebrae in the amelioration of aberrant spinal column deviation conditions.”

In November 2016, a jury in the U.S. District Court for Eastern Texas sided with Barry, awarding $15.1 million for infringement of one patent, more than $2.6 million for infringement on the second and $2.6 million for overseas infringement. In January 2017 a judge reduced the $20.3 million verdict by $2.6 million, ruling that Barry did not present sufficient evidence on the overseas violation but upholding the U.S. infringement claims. Later that year, the court awarded total damages of nearly $24 million.

In January the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a split 2-1 opinion affirming the lower court’s decision. In a March 27 filing, Medtronic asked the appeals court to seat its full complement of judges for a review of the case, arguing that the dissenting judge’s argument on one of the patents should carry the day.

“In Dr. Barry’s case, all of the foregoing considerations – the lack of records indicating experimentation, the normal fee charged, the control exercised, and the failure to inform customers of experimental purpose – would look the same if the surgeries were for commercial purposes. The only thing that affirmatively suggests these surgeries were experimental is that Dr. Barry said they were – after the fact, during litigation. As a matter of law, that is insufficient to show experimental purpose,” Judge Sharon Prost wrote in the dissent. “The record in this case shows that Dr. Barry waited too long to file for the ‘358 patent and that the on-sale bar applies.”

“Rehearing is warranted to reaffirm that such post hoc testimony, unsupported by contemporaneous objective evidence, cannotsave otherwise-invalid patent claims from operation of the statutory on-sale and public use bars,” Medtronic wrote in its rehearing petition.

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